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Tales of History - A Civ-Builder Quest

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Adhoc vote count started by Azel on Jun 15, 2018 at 4:09 PM, finished with 326 posts and 25 votes.
  • [X] Plan Prepare to Prepare
    -[X] [Action] Try to figure out a way to fell entire trees.
    -[X] [Action] Look into replicating the methods to preserve food you have heard about from other tribes.
    -[X] [Action] While the wattle makes for sturdy construction, it does little to keep the rain out. Try to find a solution.
    [X] Plan Winter is (slowly) coming
    -[X] [Action] Your tents are ill suited for this places weather. Begin making more sturdy and permanent homes. (Takes 3 Actions total, can be spread out over multiple turns.)
    -[X] [Action] Look into replicating the methods to preserve food you have heard about from other tribes.
    -[X] [Action] While the wattle makes for sturdy construction, it does little to keep the rain out. Try to find a solution.
    [X] Plan Building Economy and Spirituality:
    -[X] [Action] The small forest critters exist in great numbers, but are hard to catch. Try to catch them with traps.
    -[X] [Action] Your tents are ill suited for this places weather. Begin making more sturdy and permanent homes. (Takes 3 Actions total, can be spread out over multiple turns.)
    -[X] [Action] The spirits have shown their hand again. Try to find ways to appease them.
    [X] Plan Scouting
    -[X] [Action] Explore your surroundings further.
    --[X] Follow the river into the valleys.
    --[X] Go towards the sunset.
    --[X] Explore the mountains.
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Settling Down - 4
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Plan Prepare to Prepare
    -[X] [Action] Try to figure out a way to fell entire trees.
    -[X] [Action] Look into replicating the methods to preserve food you have heard about from other tribes.
    -[X] [Action] While the wattle makes for sturdy construction, it does little to keep the rain out. Try to find a solution.

    This time, the decision on what the tribe should do next is not an easy one. The small assembly of esteemed members of the tribe argue all night and as they retire to catch some sleep, others take their place. Soon enough, the debate spills out to everyone. That the people need stronger homes, that everyone agrees on. That they should keep out the rain is not contested either, but when to start building them is something most seem unable to agree upon. Many wish to start immediately, concerned mostly with not having to sit in the rain again after the wind tears down their tents, while others argue that better wood should be obtained first. Having to find that many long and sturdy branches to build something large enough for a family to live in would take far too long in their opinion or they would have to use branches that are too weak and would break in the wind just like their tents did.

    It takes a few days for this too settle down, the debates even spilling over into the worker groups, worst of all the gatherers. Tempers flare as the same arguments are traded back and forth, interrupting the work greatly, and it gets even worse when first some good spots are mostly eaten bare by the forest critters and then twice the haul of a day has to be abandoned due to wolves in the woods. This is when disaster strikes.

    Gathering:
    12 - 20 (Understaffed) = -8 -> No food produced.

    Fishing:
    57 -> Gained 0.3 months of food.

    Storage: 0.5 months of food.

    Tribe only able to consume 0.8 months of food.
    Minor bouts of hunger.
    Storage depleted.

    As the gatherers went to find a new patch to harvest some of the fleshy herbs, they noticed quickly that it seemed not to be entirely the same plants as they had eaten before. Carefully they got two elders from the village to see if they were good to eat and as the two old men felt no illness for a while after eating, they filled their baskets to the brim with the ample greens. Had they just returned thus, the worst might have been prevented, yet they stayed a while longer and ate a lot of the plants right then and there. By the time they made it back home, the elders had fallen sick with cramps and fever, most of the tribes gatherers following in the night and the morning after.

    Of all that were brought low by this, only one of the elders died, though it would take the better part of the moon until the affected had recovered. Some other people had ventured out in their stead to gather food, though they brought little and since all who knew where good food was to be found and what was safe to eat lay sick, their efforts did little more then allow the tribe to scrape by on grumbling stomachs. Were it not for the children fishing and the reserves, the situation would have been even more dire, yet to see empty baskets all through the camp was more then enough to have everyone worried. They knew that the air was already growing chillier.

    Woodcutting:
    48 -> Obsidian axes and saws crafted. Wood available as construction material.

    Waterproofing:
    57 -> Found loam deposit. Unlocked Wattle and Daub construction.

    Preservation:
    9 -> No progress at all.

    Amidst this crisis, other work continued with mixed success. Those tasked with finding way to preserve the fish caught never had a real chance to get something done. The moment they brought fish into the camp, someone would already be waiting and asking for it. Not that anyone truly wanted to play around, potentially ruining it with a mistake while people around him hungered. So they instead spent most of their time to tend to the sick instead.

    Those who wanted to find ways to take down trees entirely instead of just using the wood from broken branches and easily cut twigs didn't even notice all of this. They had set up a small camp near the night-stone with a few hunters, working day and night to make a better tool for the task then the bone saws that barely managed to cut through the bark. First they tried to set many small blades into a row, just as they did with the saws they knew, though as they were done, they abandoned it as a failure. The stones would get dislodged and broke far too easily, and even if the saw did not fall apart before coming that deep, the branch they've set them into meant that they could not cut the trees any deeper then the tiny blades were long.

    It was mostly an act of frustration as one of them tied a large chunk of sharped stone to a branch and began to wail on the nearest tree. They thought the brittle stone would shatter from the punishment, though to their surprise, the big chunk survived it just fine, while the tree had shown quite some damage. A few days later, they had made a few more refined axes and while it was still hard work, they could chop down some trees quite fine with them. Even the serrated knifes that others had come up with as a solution to the failure of their saw turned out to be quite useful, allowing them to partition the massive trunks into more useful sized pieces.

    Meanwhile another group investigated a find made by the hunters during the latest rains. They told of a small hillside where the plants struggled to root into the hard and unyielding earth, yet as the rain fell on it, that same hard earth had turned slippery and the water ran of it in streams. So they took some rations with them and went to experiment with that. It quickly became apparent that the water had trouble to sink into that strange earth, yet if you kneaded it into the soil by hand, you got sticky mud that could be formed easily and which would turn hard again as it dried out.

    At first they thought about making small blocks that way, letting them dry out and then stack them on top of each other. The matrons had thought about making the villages fence from stones after all and only had to give up because the stones would not properly sit on top of each other. If you could make smooth stones though, they would stack just fine. Sadly that plan went nowhere, their blocks failing to dry properly and leaving them soft and brittle. Then someone suggested to mix in plants to keep the blocks from falling apart so easily, though while those blocks were a bit more sturdy, they would still crumple if pressed on too hard.

    They nearly gave up at that point, but then took a closer look at the baskets they had used to haul the red soil around. A small layer of the earth had formed within them and unless you spend a day to peel it off, it would stick to the basket just fine. More then that, if the layer was thick and even, you could even carry water in that basket now. That discovery made their trip worthwhile at last. They could just smear the earth on a wattle wall and the water would no longer bother anyone inside. It would probably take some effort to keep they layer thick and even enough, given that the rain would soften it every time, though that seemed not that bad a problem. So they filled their baskets with the substance they had dubbed loam and made their way back home.

    By coincidence, they met the group with the tree cutting tools on their way back and thus they all arrived together in the village. The good mood that had built as they talked about their respective successes crumbled quickly when they beheld the state the tribe was in.

    Pure pandemonium ruled the camp. The people had split in three groups, standing apart from each other and arguing loudly. One group was mostly made up of matrons and their children, complaining about the rain and that the tribe thought it prudent to play around with trees and dirt instead of making proper shelters. The elders formed another group that was much smaller and sounded a lot less coherent. They too complained over the rain, about the trees, about the lack of grass and only agreed with the matrons that the tribe was wasting time, though they felt it should have been spend to leave this blighted place. The last ones were the hunters, alternating between complaining that the tribe preferred to use them as guards then to actively hunt anything and that all this arguing was getting the people nowhere. Wind was curiously enough not with them, but darted between each group and futile tried to calm the agitated people down. The gatherers meanwhile had not formed their own bunch, instead throwing their lot in with whatever group they had close kin or friends in, as they usually did.

    The only thing everyone could agree on was that the lack of food was bad and that this particular problem was the fault of the other two groups.

    Mechanics Unlocked: Factions
    Factions represent groups within an organisation that have specific goals or wish to promote their own ideas and opinions. They have tree stats, ranked from 1 to 10:
    Size - Represents how many members a faction has. This is relative to the size of both the polity they are part of and the other factions of said polity.
    Influence - Shows how much pressure a faction can apply to further its own goals. This can represent a wide array of tactics, from popular support by the masses over economic might to having many members in a kings court.
    Mood - How happy the faction is with the current state of things. This usually has also an impact on how loyal said group is to the current leadership, though specific circumstances can have even disgruntled factions stay loyal and ecstatic factions attempt to overthrow a ruler.

    Furthermore, each faction as Main Issues and Secondary Issues, representing their goals and desires. If their issues are addressed and support, their mood will rise, while failure to satisfy these demands or working against them will lower it.

    Like full polities, a faction can earn and retain cultural ideas. This is either a result of a long existing faction developing its own self-identity or because the faction itself formed around the promotion or opposition of an idea.

    Some very large factions might even form sub-factions.

    Religions are one form of factions.
    Hunters
    Size: 4 (Small)
    Influence: 7 (High)
    Mood: 4 (Discontent)

    Main Issues: Food, Glory
    Secondary Issues: Slaying the Beast

    Cultural Ideas:
    Boldness - Ideal
    The tale of the tribes great journey and its leadership is fresh in the memory of the people. The lesson they learned is that fears and uncertainty should not govern you and that great things can only be achieved by taking risks.


    Elders
    Size: 2 (Tiny)
    Influence: 4 (Low)
    Mood: 2 (Disgruntled)

    Main Issues: Food, Respect (feel disrespected due to recent marginalization)
    Secondary Issues: Moving the Settlement, Returning to Nomadic Lifestyle, Returning to Steppes


    Matrons
    Size: 6 (Average)
    Influence: 6 (Average)
    Mood: 3 (Discontent)

    Main Issues: Food, Shelter
    Secondary Issues: None

    It was not as if these groups were new or that they not always had different interests, though with the stress of having left the steppe and the strange place they had now settled in, the small divides threatened to truly divide the tribe. The recent misfortunes had hastened the process, but the people knew that this squabble would have escalated sooner or later. None the less, they also knew that it could not go on like this. If they fought each other, they would not survive and something needed to be changed.

    So the groups that had been away stepped into the fray, not to join the shouting, but to patch things up. They had not been involved in the slowly worsening situation and had people who identified with each of the groups in their midst. It was still a grueling and long task to make everyone listen to them, accept them as a neutral intermediate and finally resolve the whole mess.


    What did the tribe identify as the core of their problems?
    [] The factions themselves. The tribe should work as one, not tear itself apart over the desires of just a few of them.
    [] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
    [] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm, and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.
    [] That they had tried to settle down in this valley. The tribe should pack their things and wander the land again as it was meant to do, maybe returning here now and then for the night-stone.
    [] Something entirely different: Write-In


    AN: That mechanic should have come a decent bit later, but between the matrons not getting new homes built, the elders mutinous for a while, the hunters cooling their heels and food running out, it has reached the point where everyone got ornery and needed to vent. Enjoy your first truly political crisis.

    After you've determined the core of the problem, the next update will deal with how to fix it. So no, the first option isn't automatically inventing democracy, the second isn't going to crown a king out of nowhere and the third won't result in a shaman and a temple. This is just about in which direction you want to meddle.
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • [x] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.
     
    [X] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.

    I feel like this would be a likely option roleplaying wise. We haven't really seen a spirituality-focused civ quest on Sufficient Velocity, so this option will be interesting.
     
    [X] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
    We need Centralization
     
    [X] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.
     
    [x] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
    [x] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.

    Theocratic leadership! Early Philosophical developments! Horrific traditionalism!
     
    Powerofmind said:
    Theocratic leadership! Early Philosophical developments! Horrific traditionalism!
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    Mind you that consistently not going for spirits as an explanation or solution for things is also an expression of belief and philosophy in itself.

    Even though I bring up the option quite often, it's not impossible to go on without creating a classical faith and belief system. It's just that it is a convenient way to shunt off responsibility for Bad Things, thus helping to alleviate social pressure and allowing the leadership to shirk responsibility for something.
     
    Azel said:
    Mind you that consistently not going for spirits as an explanation or solution for things is also an expression of belief and philosophy in itself.

    Even though I bring up the option quite often, it's not impossible to go on without creating a classical faith and belief system. It's just that it is a convenient way to shunt off responsibility for Bad Things, thus helping to alleviate social pressure and allowing the leadership to shirk responsibility for something.
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    That would... be actually really fucking unique. I want to go for it...
     
    Azel said:
    Mind you that consistently not going for spirits as an explanation or solution for things is also an expression of belief and philosophy in itself.

    Even though I bring up the option quite often, it's not impossible to go on without creating a classical faith and belief system. It's just that it is a convenient way to shunt off responsibility for Bad Things, thus helping to alleviate social pressure and allowing the leadership to shirk responsibility for something.
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    But deliberately avoiding it will still stagnate early tech innovations, especially those focused on early astronomy and chemistry, am I right?
     
    Powerofmind said:
    But deliberately avoiding it will still stagnate early tech innovations, especially those focused on early astronomy and chemistry, am I right?
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    Not really. The drive behind those studies is to learn about the world. If you see these things as an expression of the divine or merely a part of the natural word is inconsequential. You are still trying to study whatever you believe to be the natural order, guiding intelligence or not.

    You don't need to believe in a creator deity to appreciate the beauty of the stars.

    And let's be frank, astronomy is a pretty useful thing on it's own. Accurately tracking time and thus the seasons would be tremendously useful to you right now, let alone for a agrarian society.
     
    [x] The spirits being disgruntled by their actions. They had send the beast, the storm and now had poisoned the people and sowed strife among them.

    I assume write ins are acceptable? @Azel

    I like the focus on the Spirits, but I think it would be cool to have them more focused on being nice protector deities instead of the usual "appease me or die!" types.
     
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    Raichu1972 said:
    [X] The spirits being unable to guide us. We have not shown them proper veneration, and thus they have been unable to protect us from misfortune.

    I assume write ins are acceptable? @Azel

    I like the focus on the Spirits, but I think it would be cool to have them more focused on being nice protector deities instead of the usual "appease me or die!" types.
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    Yes, the last option explicitly is "Write-In".

    However, your vote should go to the regular spirit option. If it wins, the next vote will be about the details of belief to be established.
     
    [X] The factions themselves. The tribe should work as one, not tear itself apart over the desires of just a few of them.

    I'd rather not willfully ignore the problems of disunity.

    [X] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
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    Azel said:
    Yes, the last option explicitly is "Write-In".

    However, your vote should go to the regular spirit option. If it wins, the next vote will be about the details of belief to be established.
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    Ah, the standard vote seemed as though it was "the Spirits are punishing us, how do we stop them?"
    But if we get to change the mythos to suit us in a following vote then I'm cool with it.
     
    [X] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
    [x] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
    [x] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
    [X] That nobody was responsible or accountable for decisions, instead having the whole tribe argue about everything. They needed to have someone or a small group that made decisions in the interest of everyone.
     
    Azel said:
    Not really. The drive behind those studies is to learn about the world. If you see these things as an expression of the divine or merely a part of the natural word is inconsequential. You are still trying to study whatever you believe to be the natural order, guiding intelligence or not.

    You don't need to believe in a creator deity to appreciate the beauty of the stars.

    And let's be frank, astronomy is a pretty useful thing on it's own. Accurately tracking time and thus the seasons would be tremendously useful to you right now, let alone for a agrarian society.
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    So where's the equivalency? As far as can be seen, the only benefit of religion is the ability to eat hits to the tribe's stability (which, granted, we see a lot of).
     
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